


Meet Me When You're Over Yourself (We'll Wait Forever)

by TheUnvanquishedZims



Category: Check Please! (Webcomic)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Magic, Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Anxiety, F/M, M/M, Magic, Magical Realism, Multi, Recreational Drug Use, Soulmates, Therapy, Vomiting
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-03
Updated: 2017-07-03
Packaged: 2018-11-23 00:02:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,130
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11391165
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheUnvanquishedZims/pseuds/TheUnvanquishedZims
Summary: Meeting your soulmate is a choice. Some people make it more easily than others.





	Meet Me When You're Over Yourself (We'll Wait Forever)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [palateens](https://archiveofourown.org/users/palateens/gifts).



There’s a tingle in her fingers. Lardo sighs and lights another stick of incense, dashing out one more ward against distraction in hurried brushstrokes. She can’t afford this magical bullshit tonight of all nights, with her first solo show opening. Nothing can be as important to her as getting the pieces finalized and to the gallery.

Not even her soulmate.

~~~

Shitty feels a tingle in his fingers, and snatches the ticket out of the envelope. His dad may be on some crazy “make my son cultured and respectable by the time he’s 35” bender, but that doesn’t mean some good can’t come out of the steaming heap of bullshit that’s been piling up in Shitty’s inbox.

_The Well is proud to debut: Larissa Duan_ is embossed in gold on the invite, and he carefully transcribes the gallery’s coordinates onto a luck spell he picked up at the corner store on his last beer run. His roommate scoffed at the generic store-bought packets, but Shitty swears he meets a new friend every time he uses one. 

Even if the tingle is just from the weed and he doesn’t meet his soulmate tonight, he can always use more friends.

~~~

The tingle in his fingers almost makes Kent rip the ticket in half. The fact that it’s a scan his agent texted him shouldn’t be a problem; he’s got enough charms carved into his fingernails under the polish that breaking his new iPhone down the middle should be a literal snap. Only the thought of explaining why he did it to his agent stops him. He never talks about Jack outside of therapy, doesn’t even like to think of him, but the tingle in his fingers is bringing back memories of another time, another tingle, another heartbreak waiting to ambush him.

_Sry can’t make it,_ he texts to his agent, then deletes the invitation and goes to bother his cat. The tingle fades to nothingness by the time he digs her out of the laundry pile. Free will ftw. Who the hell needs a soulmate anyway?

~~~

Somewhere between the first drunk old white guy calling her “an exotic talent” and the third middle-aged woman giggling as she strokes the bedazzled jock strap mounted next to a sign saying DO NOT TOUCH THE ART, Lardo finds time to sneak into the back alley and puke. Both hands are buzzing now, radiating up from fingertips to wrist, and no amount of incense or muttered cantrips has made it go away. This whole night is a disaster. Her first solo show and she’s a failure. Nobody will buy anything and she’ll be homeless and hawking her paintings on a street corner. The party coordinator for the opening was whispering to the gallery manager when she ducked out the back, most likely about whether they should issue formal apologies to the guests who bought tickets. They’ll probably just toss her work in the dumpster she’s currently being sick in after the last art snob gets bored and wanders away.

She heaves again into the trash, sputtering a little as the movement knocks her hair loose from behind her ear to swing in her face.

“Whoa, brah, let me get that for you,” a man says, voice thick with a Boston accent. She coughs around a thank you, words not coming out but tears making up for it. Her hands abruptly cease tingling, and she can tell from the way his hands pause in gathering her hair that the same just happened to him.

Fate hates her and the world’s least romantic soulmeet is punishment for her hubris with the incense and wards. She should have known you couldn’t use half-assed grade school magic to fight one of the most mystical bulwarks of human existence.

“This is so shitty,” she gasps out between choking sobs.

Miraculously, her soulmate laughs. “Bro! You have no idea!”

~~~

They move in together. To save on rent, Lardo claims, Shitty ready to jump in with a rant on the wage gap and artificially-induced rise of the nuclear family structure. She paints the ceiling over the entryway blue, weaving wards in the pattern of vines and leaves that dance around the door. Hides a few marijuana leaves in the pattern to see if he notices. He does, and loves her for it.

Lardo does her hair up, down, chops it all off, shaves a side, and dyes edges, bottom, forelock and streaks in every color of the rainbow as her whims suit her. Shitty loudly proclaims his favoritism for each and every one, and continues on his path of flowing ponytails and well-groomed facial hair. 

They take walks together, hold hands, kiss, cuddle, make out, take baths together, have sex, and borrow each other’s toothbrushes with alarming frequency. Neither can cook, so they subsist on takeout, frozen meals, and the occasional four-star restaurant when Shitty’s family is in town or Lardo’s manager convinces a potential buyer that the artiste can be pulled away from her canvas long enough to grace them with her presence.

They split the household chores right down the middle, a fair and well-reasoned decision they manage to keep up for two months before giving up and admitting that it’s driving them crazy. After that, Shitty does all the garbage pickup and Lardo keeps the house organized in some impenetrable system only she and a PhD mathematician could hope to understand. They hire a cleaner to come in once a month to dust and mop.

She teaches him the basics of warding and he picks up her most common chants and does them with her as her deadlines approach. He brings a small garden’s worth of flowerpots to the apartment and shows her some herbalism—which plants make you healthy or sharper or more relaxed. It’s mostly headology, and it makes her snort that some people seriously go gaga over the health-inducing magic of eating your veggies, but she takes the blunt when he passes it. It’s nice to relax with someone.

Cashiers and little old ladies tell them what a cute couple they are. Close friends and acquaintances are both mildly disgusted and charmed. Shitty’s grandparents send him a letter threatening to cut him out of the will. They frame it and hang it over their bed. They are, beyond a doubt, the most perfectly made-for-each-other soulmates out of everyone they know.

It’s not enough.

Something’s missing.

~~~

Kent still gets tingles sometimes. When on the phone with his agent, when booking flights, when considering certain contracts. He learns to avoid the east coast and then narrows it down to the Boston area. Thank god, because his agent would kill him if he refused every modeling job in New York. He throws himself into work, landing billboards and owning runways and spending way too much time making the same slightly pouty, slightly scowling face that his agent assures him is hot.

He earns buckets of money and blows most of it on his cat. He buys her a fuzzy scaffolding of cat trees and walkways, a jungle gym to span his entire apartment. He briefly considers commissioning a painting of her, before the tingles shooting up from his fingertips make his hands seize up. He paints sigils onto his nails with white nail polish and a toothpick. They don’t help but they distract him long enough for the idea to fade, taking the tingles with it.

It’s all in his head, his therapist says. The sensation your hands feel when choosing paths that bring you closer to your soulmate are a documented phenomenon that don’t cause physical harm. His extreme negative reaction to them stems from his history with—

“I don’t want to talk about him today,” Kent says, staring at the painting hanging behind her head. It’s just a generic landscape of some mounting sunset, but it’s always nice to have an excuse not to meet her eyes.

“All right, we don’t have to. But you need to consider the impact those formative events had and continue to have on you, and how your aversion to repeating them is preventing you from living your best life.”

“My life is pretty good. I have a great job, cute pet, good friends. I’m sleeping better. I get laid whenever I want. Got a contract coming up in New York, I told you about that right?”

“Yes, I have it on my calendar. Are you sure you don’t want to arrange a Skype appointment? Even a brief phone check-in? A month is a long time away and you’ve made some good progress coming to sessions regularly.”

“Nah, it’s fine. I can function without you holding my hand.”

“It’s not hand-holding, Kent, it’s getting the support you need to make healthy choices. If you think you can manage for a month then I’ll be happy to see you when you get back, but please don’t hesitate to call if you’re having problems or just need to talk something out. You’re keeping up with the calendar we went over?”

“Yeah, keeping track of my sleep and whatever I think is affecting my moods.”

“I’d like you to also add the tingles you get, just to see the impact they may be having.” She holds up a hand when he tries to protest.

“I know you’re not comfortable acting on the guidance it gives you, and that’s your decision to make. Plenty of people spend their lives without soulmates, and you’re not obligated to meet someone just because the universe is suggesting it. But experiencing that suggestion with such frequency may be elevating your stress levels, even unconsciously, and we’ve already been over how it’s affecting your actions. Try to incorporate documenting it into your journal so we can have an idea of how it’s impacting you, and we can factor that impact in with your other potential stressors and come up with a coping strategy.”

“…fine.”

~~~

“It’s just so fucking… _heteronormative!_ ”

It finally comes out at the end of a long rant, one of their not-arguments where she goes quiet and he gets loud, following a dozen mental tangents until he hits the problem that was bugging both of them. He’s panting with the force of it, arms still hanging mid-air as the word washes through the room. She puts her phone down with a quiet click and finally looks at him.

“It’s—it’s so stupid, to be hung up on. An upper-class cis white guy complaining that his life is too fucking boring, like he’s too good for the kind of relationship billions of people have, like there’s something inherently superior about a non-hetero relationship, something better or more exciting or, or, or-”

“Shits.”

He finally puts his arms down and manages to look at her.

“I feel the same.”

“Thank fuck,” he sighs, slumping into a chair. “Like—I’m not being melodramatic or selfish or whatever, am I? There’s seriously something going on here? Something…”

“Missing,” she says, supplying the word he was too scared to voice. He nods miserably, and she sighs and takes his hand across the table.

“Look, Shitty, I love us. I love us. Everything we’ve got here is so great. But, yeah, bro, there’s something not clicking. Not,” she continues quickly as his head shoots up, a panicked protest on his lips, “not like there’s something wrong with us. We’re great, we’re awesome. We’re _soulmates._ But like… there’s a puzzle piece missing from our lives, something we missed. Are missing. I…” And here’s the hard part. “…I felt a tingle.”

 

He doesn’t look hurt or outraged, just open and curious, and she loves this man all over again.

“When?”

“You know how I was trolling for fresh ideas and I threw that craigslist ad up about painting people’s pets on commission?”

“Yeah, bro, that was hysterical, remember the macaw?”

“Yes, but... when I posted it, as I was typing the ad I… felt a little something.”

“Oh shit, me too.”

“What?! At the same time?”

“Nah, bro, but that time my dad sent me a ticket to that fashion show in New York? Total tingles, just like before I met you. But he only sent the one, and I didn’t want to go without you, and it could have just been the weed. It could have…” He trails off, and they’re left staring at each other. He gulps. “It wasn’t, was it?”

“Nope,” she says, popping the p. “We’ve got tingles for someone else.”

“Someone—you think the same person, maybe? Or like different people from each other?”

“Dunno. Maybe both?”

“Is that even a thing, multiple soulmates? Like I know those Utah fuckers tried to claim that back in the day to cover up their skeevy wives-for-church-donations scheme, but-”

“Dude, have you seriously never heard of polyamory?”

“Yeah, of course, but with soulmates?”

“Why not?”

They stare at each other across the table, the rest of their lives dangling between them. There will be long, complicated talks in their future, but now, just now, she needs to hear this said. And Shitty, bless him, delivers.

“Wh-why not indeed! Miss Duan!” He stands and offers her a hand with a flourish. “Will you do me the honor of going soul searching with me?”

She grins and takes it.

~~~

In the end, it’s Derek Nurse’s fault. He and Kent are hooking up in New York between fall couture shoots and Derek mentions a job in Boston, some Asian chick who’s doing a fun costumed series, and Derek usually does partner projects with Poindexter but he’s bailed this time around, so if Kent’s interested…?

Kent is interested, and holding Derek’s hand on the train between cities is enough to half-convince him that the growing tingles are just pins and needles from his hand going to sleep when Derek dozes off against his side.

The unconvinced half is just tired of running.

~~~

Lardo and Shitty have a talk the morning of the shoot. It’s long and Shitty goes on about four different rambling tangents, but they get through it.

“I love you, and I love us, and no matter what happens with this guy we’ll still have each other,” Lardo declares with finality, and that is that. Her hands still tremble though.

“Sure you don’t want some tea before you go?” Shitty waves at his window garden. “I got some choice catnip that’s coming in a treat.”

“Dude, I actually need to be awake for this,” she laughs. He mock-pouts and she kisses him, reveling in the fuzzy tickle of his moustache. A part of her mind is already gone, though, racing to the future and the clean-shaven man she’ll meet today. 

~~~

She’s waiting for them at the door, hands twitching on the handle. She doesn’t even spare a glance for Derek, staring straight at Kent. He doesn’t run, but he doesn’t let go of Derek’s hand either, silently daring her to make a comment. She doesn’t say anything, just steps back to allow them inside the studio.

“Why are we still holding hands?” Derek mutters out of the corner of his mouth.

“Aesthetic,” Kent mutters back, too preoccupied with the intense buzzing from knuckles to fingertips to come up with a better answer.

“This way, dudes,” she says, and they follow her down a hallway and through a spacious, high-ceilinged room to a corner draped with black, white, pink, and gray sheets. An easel sits alone, but the area behind it is scattered with props and there are lighting rigs and multiple cameras set up around the fringes of drop cloth.

Derek finally shakes Kent’s hand off with a mumbled “Chill, bro, you’re sweating like a frosh,” and goes over to side-hug the artist.

“Larissa, good to see you. This is Kent Parson, dude’s got mad cred on the scene with this sort of theatrical junk.”

Kent manages to make eye contact. His hands are trembling a little, but he wipes a palm on his jeans and goes for a handshake.

And just like that it’s over. They’re shaking hands like professionals, and she’s smiling a little, and the buzzing is gone. From this point on, he owes the universe nothing.

“Nice to meet you, man. I hope this works out,” she says with a meaningful sincerity.

“Yeah, me too,” Kent says, and it comes out just as sincere.

~~~

Shitty swings a pen over the luck spell. He knows the coordinates of Lardo’s work studio, the same way he knows them for his mom’s house and favorite college bar and behind the gym at Andover where he’d met Derek. Shitty had been the one to introduce Derek to Lardo for her modeling needs, and the thought that he’s bringing a new friend along with him today, the very mention of which made Lardo’s fingers twitch and her eyes go wide, makes Shitty feel like… feel…

“Fuck it!” he declares, slamming his hands on the table and grabbing his coat.

Who needs luck when you’ve got a perfectly good pair of walking shoes?

~~~

“HONEY, I’M HO-OME!” Shitty bangs through the door of the studio and bounces down the hallway with enough noise for a hockey team.

Kent and Derek both startle out of their poses and Lardo curses under her breath.

“Brah, can you be chill for two hours?” she snaps, paintbrush frantically working over the canvas to capture the fleeting memory of how they were posed. She had taken reference pictures of course, but working from live models adds an indefinable quality to her art.

“Sorry Lards, I-whoa.”

Shitty going silent is enough to break Lardo the rest of the way out of the zone, and she follows his gaze to where Derek and Kent are set up. It was a provocative theme she’d chosen, reminiscent of the Nutcracker ballet, and even without the poses they’re a striking pair. Derek is dolled up as the Prince, blue and gold military coat giving way to figure-hugging white tights, gold ballet slippers and a shining crown bookending the look. Kent though…

Kent is in the same white tights, a gauzy white nightshirt draping modestly halfway down his thighs, slipping ever so slightly off his broad shoulders to flow into a bell sleeve that brushes all the way to his fingertips, obscuring the long, strong stretch of his arms as his hands twist in the lacy edges…

It does take the breath away, doesn’t it? Damn she’s good.

Shitty finally snaps out of it, walking the rest of the way up to the drop cloth and sticking out a hand. “Sup, brah, you’re the only one I don’t know here so you must be Kent!”

“No,” says Kent.

Shitty’s grin falters and his hand drops slightly. Lardo clenches her brush, looking between the two— _her_ two, her _soulmates_ —as Kent shakes his head frantically in rejection of the love of her life.

“I, uh, guess I got the name wrong?” Shitty says, shooting a questioning look at Derek who looks just as confused. But Kent talks over him, saying “I can’t, I-I just, her I could deal with but-but _this--_ ”

“Hey man, are you okay?” Derek reaches out to touch him, lying what should be a comforting hand on his shoulder, but Kent flinches away violently and without another word turns and runs.

The three of them stand in shock as the flutter of the white fabric disappears around the edge of the door, footsteps echoing on the wooden floor.

“What,” Derek finally breaks the silence with, “the fuck.”

“Soulmates,” Shitty says blankly. “Or, not soulmates I guess, if he doesn’t want, it’s not like a binding contract or anything, we don’t have to-”

“Aw man, dude, that sucks,” Derek murmurs as he crosses the room to sling an arm around Shitty’s shoulders, which are starting to shake a little as he mutters and stares blankly at the floor. Lardo gives him a nod over Shitty’s head before heading out of the studio after Kent.

She doesn’t have far to go; he’s in the front office huddled behind the reception desk, out of sight of anyone passing the large glass window that makes up the front wall of the studio. The fact that his shoulders are shaking too is the only reason she doesn’t bite his head off immediately. Instead she takes a deep breath and slides down next to him, keeping an arm’s length away but close enough that he can’t ignore her.

“You wanna tell me what the hell that was about?”

“I’m sorry,” he says in a small voice. Combined with the nightshirt and huddled posture it’s enough to make her heart melt, just a tad. “I just… don’t do soulmates. Like, I’m sure you’re great and all, but I haven’t had a good history with following my tingles, and I wasn’t really looking to settle down with anyone like that, and with you it-it was n-nice, it was easy to ignore, I could just go with it, but then he came in and I got the tingles all over again and _fuck!_ ”

He bangs his head forward against his knees hard. She shoots a hand out to stop him from doing it a second time and he lets his face press into her palm, shivers turning into choked-off sobs. She lets her palm rest there against his face for a minute, then snags a box of tissues off the desk and knee-walks the two feet needed to pull him against her chest.

She wishes she could say she’s surprised when Shitty plunks down next to her, carefully keeping her between him and Kent. She wants to reassure him, chastise him, comfort him, but she’s doing all three for Kent, so she settles for looking over her shoulder and twitching a meaningful eyebrow at Shitty.

“Derek’s packing up,” he says in a subdued voice. She hates that tone; he uses it after a particularly rough spat with his family, but with Kent gone still in her arms she can’t bring herself to hate him for making Shitty sad.

“Sorry,” Kent mumbles again. “I’m ruining everything.”

“Nah, man, this is a healthy expression of emotion. Let the moment take you.”

Kent laughs wetly against Lardo’s shoulder. “Fuck, you two are being so nice and I’m sitting here in pajamas like a hysterical drama queen.” Then, quieter: “This is so shitty.”

Lardo and Shitty lock eyes. For a moment the rest of their lives dangle between them. Then they both burst out laughing.

~~~

“Did we get another fruit basket from your therapist?”

“No, that one’s from my agent. She’s happy that I’m moving in with you, it really cuts down on the travel time and budget for me to be a four-hour train ride away from New York. The muffin basket is from my therapist.”

“Aw, cool. She’s really happy for you, isn’t she?”

“Thrilled. I don’t know why, without me dealing with my soulmate hang-ups she’s probably lost a big chunk of therapy fees.”

“Some people just like to see other people happy.”

“Weirdoes.”

“Hahaha, yeah dude. Hey, think I can get away with eating one of these bananas?”

“Shitty, if you break your pose or mess with the still life, I’ll kill you before Lardo has a chance to notice.”

“Harsh, bro.”

“We’ve been posing for three hours. I’m not about to let it go to waste because you forgot to snack ahead of time.”

“Finished,” Lardo finally pipes up from behind the canvas.

Kent and Shitty drop their poses, Shitty flopping to the ground and Kent doing a more graceful stretch to loosen his muscles. They take a minute to catch their breath before drifting around to flank Lardo, looking over her shoulders at the finished work as she fills in the corners with paint and signs her initials at the bottom.

“Brah. It’s a masterpiece.”

“You say that every time.”

“It’s true every time!”

Kent chuckles at the pair as they bicker their way through cleanup, loitering in front of the canvas. He stares at it, trying to memorize the way Lardo captured his and Shitty’s hands tangling together, how they unconsciously lean towards each other, the way the sun shines off their hair. He doesn’t know how she managed to nail the chemistry between them, the comfort and ease as they lay together bantering in her studio. He barely knows how he was so comfortable and at ease in the first place; it’s only been a few short months since he met them and yet…

His eyes drifted over to where Shitty’s painting a handlebar moustache onto Lardo’s face, his hands completely steady, the way Lardo’s hands had been steady while she painted them together, the way Kent’s hands were are steady now as he picks up a brush and goes to join them.

He’s home here.


End file.
